05 December 2016 3:45 PM

I mistrust too much anger in politics. A bit is all right, especially when the other side are telling lies or refusing to listen. But not too much. And not too much self-righteousness either, please. None of us is right all the time. That’s why we have a Loyal Opposition and an adversarial Parliament, and the presumption of innocence, come to that.

Perhaps I am just too conscious of the horrors of Civil War. I am drawn to historical depictions of these wars, by a fearful fascination. How did men of the same nation end up slaughtering each other? Could this happen among our gentle hills and woods? Yes, it could, and has. Start treating opponents as enemies, and there is no telling where it might end.

I live in a city that was besieged in such a war, and where you can still, if you look carefully, find traces of old fortifications in now-peaceful suburbs. I have read, in history and in fiction, depictions of these events, of the horrible relentless inevitability with which the two sides have first ceased to listen to each other, then turned their backs on each other and finally begun killing each other. The past, as Evelyn Waugh once said, is the only thing we possess for certain. We should pay close attention to it.

… full of pain and regret at the turning of Englishman against Englishman:

‘And the raw astonished ranks stand fast

To slay or to be slain

By the men they knew in the kindly past

That shall never come again’

You might find something a little similar in Gore Vidal’s rather beautiful description (in his novel ‘Lincoln’) of Abraham Lincoln visiting wounded Confederate prisoners of war. One of the badly-injured young men, unlikely to survive and in some pain, turns away from him in loathing and disgust. ‘Son, we are all the same at the end’, says the unhappy President, quietly. The reader alone knows how true this will be, and how soon. It is in this book that Lincoln, driven to misery and self-loathing by the carnage he must pursue to the end, rages that the very rooms in which he works and sleeps seem to have filled up with blood.

And these episodes are nothing to the Civil Wars of Russia and Spain, both in our times, adding modern weapons to pre-mediaeval cruelty. Not to mention the merciless wars of Ireland in the early part of this century, and their more recent sequels.

at the end of last week, I did not know until I was at my keyboard how very much I felt that some sort of generosity was called for. If you love your country – and this is the only real motivation for wanting its independence – then you also love your fellow countrymen and your fellow countrywomen. Therefore if you disagree with them , you seek to do so with patience, kindness and tolerance, and a readiness to listen. So what if they don't do the same? 'Render unto no man evil for evil'.

To me, for many years, the most moving part of any election has been the victor’s declaration (not always made) to serve *all* his constituents, whether they voted for him or not – and my own (Labour) MP has been an exemplary follower of this principle, to my personal knowledge. Heaven help us if it is ever otherwise.

Most sensible pro-EU people now recognise that the vote went against them and that we must therefore leave the EU.

I have mocked those who did not recognise the outcomeof the referendum and fantasised about frustrating the result, reminding them of Brecht’s joke about how, the people having failed the elite, the elite would like to elect a new people. Too bad. Once you accept the democratic principle, the majority is the absolute decider.

They, like those who wanted to leave, took part in the campaign on that basis. But of course it was never quite as simple as that , especially in a free, plural society with a de facto separation of powers, adversarial newspapers, law courts, a powerful civil service and the BBC,

Would leavers, had we lost, have accepted the vote? Yes. Would we have sunk back and given up all hope of leaving forever? I somehow doubt it. We would also have continued to seek to block many aspects of EU membership, such as Schengen and the Euro, Turkish or Ukrainian membership of the EU and any plans for a European Army.

Remainers are now doing the approximate equivalent. Do I blame them? No. What is more, they have quite a lot to work on. It is silly to pretend that they don’t. Let me explain.

Be in no doubt that there are many and varied ways of achieving the apparently simple aim of leaving the EU. And that if that aim is badly messed up, there could one day even come a campaign to rejoin the EU, which will undo all you have achieved.

One of the many odd, unsatisfactory things about the referendum is that the movement which won it dissolved itself at the point of victory. We did not elect a new government (though we destroyed the old one, which has been replaced by a pale ghost of its former self). We cannot turn to the leaders of the ‘Leave’ campaign and say ‘what exactly did you mean to do next?’, because they are scattered to the winds, some in internal exile, some hidden inside the government, some fulminating in UKIP factions.

If we could ask them, what would they say? How deeply had they thought about the matter? Did they even have a unified position? Weren’t some of them globalists who wanted Britain out of the protective embrace of the EU so it could be more open to the keen winds blowing from the far East?

Weren’t others more my sort, who value Britain’s special unique nature and didn’t want to see it absorbed or erased or diluted either by the EU or by globalisation? These aren't really allies. they have a single negative desire - to get out of the EU. But their positive plans are hostile to each other.

Then there’s the question of responsibility. Victory in an election (as those who take part well know) means that you are now personally in charge of keeping the promises you made. Victory in a referendum has no such automatic price. We did not elect a new government last June. We just robbed the existing government of the central pillar of most of its activity, and forced it to do something it didn’t want to do and will do as slowly and unwillingly as it can. There is no force in British politics which can change that.

The Leave campaigners then either went home quietly, or began writing rude memoirs about their allies, or embarked on wild political manoeuvres, only to be rolled flat by the bizarre juggernaut of Theresa May, who inherited Downing Street because she had been vague and rather cowardly, and who was given the job of implementing a policy she opposed -presumably because she had opposed it more feebly than most.

We must also wonder, given their performance for many years before in front-line politics, whether *all* the major figures in the Leave campaign were in fact wholly committed to the cause they espoused; or whether they ever intended to win. I was utterly amazed when Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson and Michael Gove declared themselves in favour of leaving. It was at that moment that my former certainty, that ‘Remain’ would win the vote, began to evaporate. I had actually argued with Mr Gove, many years before, that the main reason leaving the EU was unpopular was hat no leading politicians were in favour of it. The public therefore assumed that it was a dangerous policy. At the time, as I recall, he took the David Cameron view, that it was a marginal subject we shouldn't 'bang on' about.

Of course both sides were unscrupulous. But that's not worth worrying about. As so often, Larry Elliott of ‘The Guardian’ makes the key point very well. He disposes of Remainers’ moans about the untruths told by the ‘Leave’ campaign here

But this frivolous disregard for truth (on both sides) was partly a consequence of the irresponsibility I mention above. As soon as the campaign was over, both sides bolted back to their normal homes and loyalties, like vandals discovered in mid-crime by the police, scattering down every available dark alleyway, never to meet again.

I also have to mention the amazing predicament of the Labour Party, whose leader was ideally positioned to do as little as he could to discourage his party’s voters from registering a huge protest against mass immigration - one millions of them had been longing to make for years.

So, we have a narrow victory, based on unique circumstances, obtained largely by people who didn’t know (and hadn’t thought very hard about) what they were going to do next. Is this really a sound basis for a triumphalist parade? Not everyone on our side is brilliant and good. Not everyone on the other side is stupid or wicked. Fight them, by all means, but with reason and facts, not self-righteous rage. If the vote were held again now, it might just as easily go the other way. Is it wise to pretend to be unaware of that, or to think it just doesn’t matter?

And now, as a nation and an economy, we are up against an EU in which at least one very skilful and dogged rival, France, will do all she can to do us down. France has several reasons to do this. Her establishment wants to squash Marine le Pen’s Front National, and making an exit from the EU look hard and painful will help this process. Then there’s the little matter of the Battles of Waterloo and Trafalgar, and French resentment (shared by Germany) of the continuing dominance of the City of London in European finance. Do you think they’re going to be nice to us?

And is it really not worth noting that figures such as Christopher Booker, the most sustained and well-informed campaigner against British membership of the EU, are genuinely worried that we might damage ourselves if we seek too much, too fast? The attitude of some on this blog has been close to Stalinist in their empurpled unreasoning wrath. Any minute now I expect to hear voices accusing me and Christopher Booker of wrecking railroads and sabotage, and of being secret agents of Brussels.

Sure, economic logic dictates that they want our markets. But the EU has always been a political body, with economics coming second to politics, or how could they have agreed to merge their currencies? Politics comes first. They cannot make it easy or cheap for us to leave. There will be a price of some sort.

Finally, I’d mention (as I did in my Sunday article) the fact that the ghastly embodiment of cynicism, the Conservative Party is still in office in this country. This is a party which is very good at political murder, as Margaret Thatcher and Iain Duncan Smith could readily attest. Those Tories who push now for a hard and fast departure may find that Mrs May and her inner circle give them all the freedom they want, wait for them to fail, and then destroy them.

What might the result of that be? Let’s speculate wildly. A catastrophic failure of negotiations, a British walk-out, or a an EU refusal to concede another inch, a run on Sterling (which is waiting to happen again anyway), a humiliating return to talks (on worse terms) and then perhaps that long-threatened election, fought as a second referendum on the half-hearted deal we eventually get?

I don’t know, and nor do you. All I know is that I find the noisy, chest-thumping over-confidence of some Leavers increasingly hard to take. I think it is dangerous for the country and, regardless of whether anyone likes what I say or not, I am going to point this out.

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10 November 2016 4:06 PM

sounds better without vision. I should have noticed the curious up-the-nostrils angle of the camera, which generally means the person employing it wants to make you look stupid. I doubt if it was intentional in this case, but even so, it's no fun to watch for any length of time.

06 November 2016 12:23 AM

This is what happens when you call in the cowboys to do an important job. It goes wrong and you can't afford to fix it. You thought you could trust the Tory Party. You thought you could ignore our rather good constitution and bypass it with a referendum. I did warn you.

In May 2013, I pointed out the dangers of a referendum, asking: 'Has Parliament been abolished? Has a constitution been quietly introduced, which demands that such issues are decided by plebiscite, and makes the result of such plebiscites binding on Parliament?'I've heard no such proposal, and can't see how it could be so, given the cowardly, ignorant or plain stupid attitudes of most MPs to this question.

'It's certainly understood, by constitutional lawyers, that such an obligation is important for any serious plebiscite, and its presence or absence in any legislation will be crucial. I suspect it will be absent.' And so it was.

Now you find out you were wrong, who are you going to call? For years I explained that the only way out of the EU was to replace the Tories with a genuinely patriotic conservative party that could win an Election. The referendum proves that the votes were there.

In October 2011, I said: 'Even if they succeeded in getting their referendum, and even if they succeeded in winning it… it would not bind the British government. The only real solution is for a General Election to be won by a party committed to secession.'

We would then have had an actual government determined to do what the people wanted, without any need to hurry to prove itself, and with a good idea of how it would use our new-found independence once we regained it. Instead we had a cynical campaign led by people who still cannot escape the suspicion that they never intended to win and were shocked and dismayed when they did.

And we have a pantomime horse – a policy being ineptly and half-heartedly implemented by people who don't support it. And we have a constitutional crisis, as I said we would on June 12 when I also correctly predicted that 'Leave' would win.

So I can't join in the bizarre and rather lawless squawking of rage at the High Court's ruling that Parliament must vote on Article 50. It is a perfectly reasonable judgment, based on my favourite bit of the Constitution, the 1689 Bill of Rights which guarantees our freedom far more surely than any human rights rubbish.

Actually this doesn't mean that Parliament will block our formal exit from the EU. Only a small coven of kamikaze MPs would dare to do that. The elite have other, cleverer plans.

But it does mean that Chairman May will now have the excuse she needs to fudge our exit. Parliament, and the Civil Service, will 'take back control' of the process. And what we will get will almost certainly be the Norway option – continued access to the Single Market and very little control over our borders.

We will move from being halfway into the EU to being halfway out of it. The referendum's simple requirement, that we leave the EU, will be fulfilled, beyond question.

But of course that wasn't all that millions of people voted for. If we want the rest of it, especially border control, we simply cannot rely on the existing parties or the establishment to get it.

A monster created by 007

This is why it matters when films and TV series make things up and tell lies for effect – like the ghastly King's Speech and the new Netflix series that claims to portray the private life of the Queen.

Reality nowadays copies what is on the screen. Poor Mexico City must now endure annual macabre, pagan Day Of The Dead parades, because the James Bond film Spectre showed such an event taking place there.

It didn't until now. But the Mexico City government thought it would bring in the tourists, so now they have to have it. I'd travel a long way to avoid this creepy, ugly event, but, as I know well, I'm out of touch.

Even weirder than the effect of movies and TV on truth is their effect on fiction. My favourite example of this is Inspector Morse who, in the original books, drove a Lancia but acquired a Jaguar in the later ones to fit in with the screen version.

How long before all the classics are rewritten and crammed with panting sex and incest, so as to make them conform with Andrew Davies's ghastly adaptations?

**********

Sheer bleeding nerve department. One of the noisiest campaigners against new grammar schools is a body called the Education Policy Institute. It declares that it is 'independent, impartial and evidence-based'.

Oh, yeah? Here's some evidence-based research on it. It started life as a Liberal Party think-tank called the Centre for Reform and its main benefactors are often Liberal Democrats.

Among its leading figures are the former Lib Dem Minister David Laws, and the Blairite factotum Sally Morgan (neither known for their support of grammar schools).

Two of its major figures (one a donor to the Tories in the Cameron anti-grammar years) are also connected with 'Academy' schools, which tend to see grammars as rivals. Impartial? Independent?

Last chance for useless cops

The jailing of a Polish lorry driver for slaughtering a family while looking at his stupid phone is only partly just. Millions of British people have come close to doing something similar and have only been saved from it by the grace of God.

Using your phone while driving is about as sane and sensible as throwing knives at your children while blindfolded. The trouble is that people are so selfish and complacent that they do not find this out until they kill or maim someone.

And they don't believe they will. Nor are they in the least impressed by calls for 'tougher sentences' for this crime. Because they know –as one driver I upbraided recently told me – that the police don't care and will do nothing about it.

Indeed they won't. I continue to be amazed that anyone still defends our police against the charge of uselessness which I ceaselessly level at them.

What is it that they do, apart from monitoring Twitter, festooning the place with tape and racing to crimes after they have happened and it is too late? When did you last see an actual traffic patrol? I'd guess 1987.

The solution may well be to sack the police and start again. But let's give them one last chance. Get out there now and arrest everyone you see using a phone at the wheel. The CPS can join in by actually charging them.

Only when everyone knows someone who's in jail for this moronic offence will it cease. That's how drunk driving was stamped out and how seat-belts became standard. Enforcement.

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03 November 2016 11:39 AM

Leave aside whether you or I are annoyed by the High Court’s judgement on Article 50, or think it perverse according to law. Are you really surprised by it?

I am not.

Below are links to various more-or-less prophetic articles (wrong in some respects, especially my belief , later revised a fortnight before the vote, that the anti-EU cause was most unlikely to win the referendum; strikingly right in others) in which I explained to impatient and tetchy readers why I did not want a referendum, and was not convinced that such a vote could get us out of the EU:

I wrote : ‘Even if they succeeded in getting their referendum, and even if they succeeded in winning it – near impossible without at least one major party calling for a vote to withdraw - it would not bind the British government. The only real solution is for a general election to be won by a party committed to secession. And with the Tory party in the way, bed-blocking the position that ought to be occupied by such a party, that will never happen.’

In May 2013, I wrote: ‘Why is there such a fuss about a referendum on British, sorry, I mean Ukay, membership of the European Union? Has Parliament been abolished? Has a constitution been quietly introduced, which demands that such issues are decided by plebiscite, and makes the result of such plebiscites binding on Parliament?

‘I’ve heard no such proposal, and can’t see how it could be so, given the cowardly, ignorant or plain stupid attitudes of most MPs to this question.

‘It’s certainly understood, by constitutional lawyers, that such an obligation is important for any serious plebiscite, and its presence or absence in any legislation will be crucial. I suspect it will be absent.’

I also prophesied the constitutional crisis which is now developing. I said:

‘I think we are about to have the most serious constitutional crisis since the Abdication of King Edward VIII. I suppose we had better try to enjoy it.

‘If – as I think we will – we vote to leave the EU on June 23, a democratically elected Parliament, which wants to stay, will confront a force as great as itself – a national vote, equally democratic, which wants to quit. Are we about to find out what actually happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?’

The other point I made *after* the result was that the EU itself, and its supporters in this country (no shortage of them in positions of influence in politics, law, diplomacy and media) would act tough to begin with eventually offer us a compromise under which we will, in effect, stay inside the EU.

This isn’t exactly wishful thinking, of the sort which guides many of the reactions to the High Court ruling on Article 50. I have been committed to national independence for many years. But I have infuriated and failed to persuade most of my readers by repeatedly saying that the destruction of the Tory party, and its replacement by a genuinely patriotic and conservative formation, were the essential preliminaries to achieving this.

Well, instead of working hard and saving up to buy my well-crafted, effective if antique device, with its polished brass hinges, well-oiled mechanisms and chased silver decorative bits, they went down to the industrial estate on the edge of town, and maxed out their credit card to purchase a cheapo, bodge-it-yourself instant exit kit – the referendum. Then they hired a plausible man with a grubby white van to install it. It seemed to work to start with. Now it’s giving out alarming knocking and whistling noises, and shuddering in a worrying way. But where’s the man who installed it? His mobile phone seems to have gone dead.

Well, this is what happens when you get the cowboys in. I really did tell you so. We’ll end up in the European Economic Area before this is over, you mark my words – halfway out of the EU instead of where we were, which was halfway in.

09 October 2016 1:26 AM

British politics has finally vanished up its own pretensions. The old signposts and measurements have all been removed. We have no idea who stands for what or where we are going. Who would have thought to see a Tory conference applauding a Prime Minister for vowing to raise more tax and weaken employers’ rights? Surely that’s the job of the other lot?

In fact most of Chairman May’s speech could have equally well been written and delivered at a Labour conference. She may have derided Jeremy Corbyn personally but she has noticed quite a lot of his ideas are rather popular, especially with the young, and stolen them. Who can blame her? She faces nothing but uncertainty and danger. The Labour Party is very nearly dead but her own Tories seethe with intrigue, rivalry and suppressed dissent.

The landscape before her is like one of those lakes covered in bright green water weed that looks – at a first glance – like a smooth lawn. In fact it conceals slimy depths. Only a fool would try to walk on it.

Her inexplicable breezy confidence about leaving the EU makes me shudder, and I am a veteran campaigner for national independence. I wouldn’t dream of activating Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, which starts the two-year clock for our exit, because it places all the negotiating power in the hands of our continental rivals. And they, especially Germany, hope to scare all the other EU nations into staying in. The last thing they want to do is to make an exit easy for us.

I’d insist on getting all the talking done before taking this dangerous step. As for her Great Repeal Bill, it is nothing of the sort. Until we actually get out, it just confirms 40 years of EU laws and regulations.

Already her Cabinet is openly divided about keeping access to the Single Market. And if anyone thinks that the Bad Losers’ Party has given up its dream of rerunning the referendum, just wait and see. They will fight this in the courts, in the Commons, in the Lords, in the civil service and in the BBC.

Given all these perils, it is only wise of Mrs May to blow kisses in the general direction of Labour voters, while also trying to persuade refugees from Ukip to come back to mummy. The 2020 Election seems far away, but its result will probably be decided during the next two years.You may not like any of this. I certainly don’t. But it comes, as so many bad things do, from taking short cuts and trying to bodge complicated bits of carpentry with a few swift strokes of the hammer.

Millions of voters thought they could have a policy without a government to implement it. They thought they could leave the nation’s fate to the political class rather than taking a hand in it themselves.

They fell for David Cameron’s promise of a referendum, which he never expected to keep because he intended to continue the Coalition with the Lib Dems until 2020. They thought they could rely on the Tory Party to take them out of the EU, even though it had let them down on so many other things.

So, deep down, they changed nothing. A few toyed with the Dad’s Army party of Ukip, now once again enjoying ripping itself to pieces, its main activity. But they wouldn’t see that the Tories had become a blue-tinged version of New Labour.Now there’s a new collective delusion, that Theresa May is the new Margaret Thatcher. Actually she’s the new Harriet Harman. I’ve charted her embrace of political correctness here over many years.

Even her increasingly vague promise to maybe, just possibly, open one or two new grammar schools, provided the middle class cannot get into them, will probably trickle away into the damp sands of compromise where truly good ideas end up in our system.

*****

I know I’m not going to like Netflix’s The Crown, the new drama about the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. In fact I think it should not have been made, and should not be made for another 20 or 30 years when the actual facts are known and the papers available.Even then, it would probably be nearly as bad. Like all such productions, it exploits the real people it pretends to portray. If it were about fictional royal figures, and did not claim to be their real lives, nobody would watch it.

But it cannot possibly be true. Above all, like the misleading, over-rated film The King’s Speech, it tries to see people through the distorting lens of present-day prejudice. My parents and their friends were more or less of the same generation as the Queen and Prince Philip, and my father was a naval officer. And it seems to me that even the faces of Claire Foy, who plays the Queen, and Matt Smith, who plays the Duke of Edinburgh, are wrong. They lack the depth and grief and sense of duty carved into the faces of that generation by their stern upbringing, and by the war. They are too knowing about trivial things, and too innocent of important ones.

Their attempts at the accents of the time sound as if they have been laboriously taught them and they long to burst out laughing, not as if they think it normal to speak like that, as such people really did.

And the odd thing is that they spoke like that while enduring danger, pain and fear and, in a way, saving the world. There wasn’t anything funny about itI am told King George VI, that improbably decent monarch, is shown using the c-word. I doubt he did. Naval man though he was, and so familiar with the whole range of filthy language, I think he would have regarded it as impossibly crude.

And if they can get that wrong, it is like a clock striking 13. All that went before, and all that comes afterwards, is in doubt as well.

*****

I am not sure that the alleged comedian David Baddiel was trying to be nice when he urged the BBC to give me a ‘Right-Wing Hour’ on Radio 4.The last time we met, on a TV review programme, I said that I was pleased and relieved when his dreary film, The Infidel, came to an end. He may not have forgotten.

But even so he now joins many other BBC types, from Andrew Marr to Mark Thompson, in admitting ‘there is generally a centre-Left, liberal bias to its output’.And this is getting worse. As this newspaper revealed last Sunday, diversity commissars are culling BBC performers on the grounds of race and sex. This is a mad outcome.

When I was a Leftist in the 1960s, we at least believed that discrimination of all kinds was wrong. To this day I write ‘human’ when asked for my ethnic details by some busybody.

Even an hour a week in which such wicked ideas could be attacked and mocked would be better than nothing.

*****

One of the saddest sights in the university town where I live is ‘Freshers’ Week’, which means nightly pathetic processions of bewildered teens, clad in uniform joke T-shirts, being led off to bars to be taught how to get drunk. I really hope that the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference was right when it said today’s sixth formers are sick of the Olympic boozing that has become so universal.

It is the drinking, of course, that also leads to so many of the rapes and alleged rapes that cause so much misery of so many kinds. I wonder why we treat this sad business as a joke.

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04 September 2016 1:34 AM

What are the real thoughts of Chairman May as she sits amid a Cabinet made up mostly of nonentities nobody would recognise in the street?

There this feeble Politburo hunches, squeaking amid the Elizabethan grandeur of Chequers, a government committed to a task most of them hate. Even Boris Johnson doesn’t really want to leave the EU.

‘Brexit means Brexit,’ intones the Prime Minister. But this slogan seems to have escaped from Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, where Humpty Dumpty proclaims that words mean what he says they mean.

If I were her, I’d be scared of the months to come. France, our ancient rival, has spotted that nobody in London has decided what we really want.

As we dither, they will undermine us. Before long it will be clear that either we exit the EU single market and take our chances, or do a deal under which we stay, more or less, under Brussels rule.

France wouldn’t be able to bully a government committed to departure, backed by a parliamentary majority.

Such a government could be genuinely tough in talks, because it had a real, much desired aim.

But this lot? As Winston Churchill said of a similarly soggy Cabinet in 1936, they are ‘decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity’.

From behind them come the endless whispers, especially from the USA, which drove us into the EU in the first place, that we might ‘walk back’ the decision.

Plus there are the mutterings of the Civil Service, the diplomats, and the BBC.

These are tricky times. Chairman May, who claims to admire the first Queen Elizabeth, may find that she faces nearly as many foes as that cunning monarch did, at home and abroad.

But the most dangerous ones will be among the smiling faces round the Chequers table.

She is not there because she is strong but because – for the moment – nobody else is stronger.

Cowardly truth about Oxford's state school 'success'

Oxford University boasts of increasing its state school intake to 59.2 per cent. How cowardly of it. On the same day we learned that most boys (50.46 per cent) leave state primary school without reaching the Government’s pretty basic standards in reading, writing or maths. Many will never catch up.

If state school children are getting into Oxford, it’s either because they go to super-exclusive fake comprehensives, surrounded by expensive houses or open only to churchgoers; or they go to besieged and rare grammar schools; or they have private tutors; or they have been given special treatment and are not really up to Oxford’s standards.

In the days before ‘comprehensive’ schools, Oxford’s non-public school intake was rising fast without any of these tricks or reduced standards – from 38 per cent in 1939 to 51 per cent by 1965.

If grammar schools had survived, many reckon it would soon have reached 70 per cent, and maybe higher. Oxford should campaign to bring back selective state schools, not cringe before the equality commissars.

But we are at the mercy of crude egalitarians. The supposedly Tory Government continues to employ Alan Milburn, the Blairite former Cabinet Minister and (so far as I know) unrepentant student Marxist.

Mr Milburn, who refuses to tell me where his own children went to school, regularly attacks the privilege of private education, though never that of the socially exclusive pseudo-comprehensive state schools favoured by well-off Leftists.

As head of the creepy quango the Social Mobility Commission, he cranks out regular reports claiming that public school toffs rule the world. He’s just got lots of headlines by claiming that City bankers still discriminate against applicants who wear brown shoes.

His evidence for this? A 15-year-old book about the death of the traditional banking industry, by a man whose name his report misspells, and another book on the City by a Dutch expert on the Middle East.

People do believe what they want to believe, I find.

It's official: The British bobby IS dead

My ‘I told you so’ department is now back from a much-needed holiday, after a long summer of full-power gloating and smirking. Immediately it has new work to do. Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary has (after 50 years) finally grasped that police foot patrols have been abolished.

Congratulations, HM Inspector! Well spotted! Even so, he buried it in his complacent survey report, where among all the politically correct stuff, it reveals on page 38 that one third of us have not seen a uniformed police officer on foot in their area in the past year – in the past two decades, in my case.

Even this fact is turned into a PC lecture about ‘more deprived areas’. One in four say they see one once a month. If so, he was probably nipping into Costa Coffee for a flat white.

So what are they doing instead? As we learned again last week, car pursuits seem to appeal far more than plodding the pavement deterring crime and disorder. Are these pursuits – which in some years have led to as many as 20 innocent deaths – even remotely worth the risk?

But while resources are available for such chases, what of shopping centres such as The Stow in Harlow, where a Polish man, Arkadiusz Jozwik, was violently (and fatally) attacked? Gangs of menacing youths smoking cannabis, that peaceful drug Sir Richard Branson wants to legalise, have been patrolling The Stow for months, promoting fear and disorder.

But police – as everywhere – seem to have paid little attention to either the menace or the illegal drug abuse. Now, too late, they are present – for a while. And there is a lot of grandiose stuff about a ‘hate crime’.

Maybe, maybe not, but it might also be ‘Dope Crime’, that growing category, and also a ‘Neglect Crime’, the sort of thing that happens on streets which the police have quietly ceded to the violent and lawless.

Can there be any simpler way of putting this? Doctors should never go on strike. Mercy is not a commodity that can just be withdrawn.

People living with pain and fear cannot be deliberately ignored by those trained and paid to help them.

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It will be good for Britain if Jeremy Corbyn wins his fight to stay as leader of the Labour Party. I agree with the late Queen Mother that the best political arrangement for this country is a good old-fashioned conservative government kept on its toes by a strong Labour Opposition.There’s no sign of a good old-fashioned conservative government. But Mr Corbyn speaks for a lot of people who feel left out of the recovery we are supposed to be having, and they need a powerful voice in Parliament. There is nothing good (or conservative) about low wages, insecure jobs and a mad housing market which offers nothing but cramped rooms and high rents to young families just when they need space, proper houses with gardens, and security.I only wish the voiceless millions of conservative patriots had a spokesman as clear and resolute as Mr Corbyn is for his side. The truth is that both major parties have been taken over by the same cult, the Clinton-Blair fantasy that globalism, open borders and mass immigration will save the great nations of the West.It hasn’t worked. In the USA it has failed so badly that the infuriated, scorned, impoverished voters of Middle America are on the point of electing a fake-conservative yahoo businessman as President.So far we have been gentler with our complacent elite, perhaps too gentle. Our referendum majority for leaving the EU was a deep protest against many things. But it did not actually throw hundreds of useless MPs out on their ears, as needs to be done. They are all still there, drawing their pay and expenses.So the Establishment has yet to realise just how much fury and impatience were expressed in that vote. Now we are in a very dangerous place. Theresa May’s back-to-normal Government has no idea how much disappointed rage it will unleash if it fails to regain control of our borders in the coming negotiations with the EU. Mrs May thinks she can fudge it, delay it and bog it down, so that at the end we can move from being half in the EU to being half out of it. She thinks she can outfox the anti-EU figures in her own party.Maybe she can. But she cannot outfox the angry people who have demanded something and still hope and intend to get it. And if she tries, she will risk the appearance of a British Trump, a disaster for all of us.If Mr Corbyn wins, our existing party system will begin to totter. The Labour Party must split between old-fashioned radicals like him, and complacent smoothies from the Blair age. And since Labour MPs have far more in common with Mrs May than with Mr Corbyn, there is only one direction they can take. They will have to snuggle up beside her absurdly misnamed Conservative Party. And so at last the British public will see clearly revealed the truth they have long avoided – that the two main parties are joined in an alliance against them.And they may grasp that their only response is to form an alliance against the two big parties. Impossible? Look how quickly this happened in Scotland.The Prime Minister may come to regret her vain, boastful behaviour at Question Time last Wednesday, when she bragged about how big her party was and how it was united behind her. These things can change, and very fast. I think she will know these words: ‘Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.’It may not be very long before she sits on the Opposition benches, with a broken and hostile party behind her.

You don't look much like a 'Royal basher' now, Liz

I greatly enjoyed seeing Ms Liz Truss, the new Lord Chancellor, in her majestic Tudor-style robes of office, redolent of old England, tradition and deference.It is amusing to recall Ms Truss’s radical anti-Monarchy speech to the Liberal Democrat conference in 1994 (she was once on the national executive committee of that party’s youth and student wing) when she proclaimed: ‘We do not believe people are born to rule.’ Her target was the Queen. She found out soon afterwards that Oxford graduates in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, such as herself, are indeed born to rule, and it doesn’t much matter which party they are in. I’m sure she’ll enjoy the many conversations with Her Majesty she’ll now have, thanks to her new high office.

Trident blows our defence apart

How sad that the argument about replacing Trident submarines is always expressed as Trident or nothing. The insane cost of this weapon is destroying the Royal Navy and the Army. I’ve said before that spending £100 billion on Trident and neglecting conventional forces is like spending so much on insuring yourself against alien abduction that you can’t afford cover against fire and theft. And so it is.But it’s worse than that. Trident was designed to deter the USSR, a state that ceased to exist 25 years ago. The system isn’t independent. The USA owns and services the missiles and knows where our submarines are. To be really independent, it would have to be usable even if the USA didn’t want us to use it. It isn’t.Sir Michael Quinlan, the brilliant civil servant who strove to maintain a British nuclear deterrent, said before he died in 2009 that even he wasn’t in favour of Trident at any price. The truth is that nuclear weapons are a giant bluff. I don’t believe Mrs May, whose Christian faith I don’t doubt, would ever actually order a nuclear strike on a populated city. But she has to pretend she might and we have to pretend to be able to. All we need to do is to hang on to a few H-bombs and the planes to drop them and we can have all that Trident gives us, for 100th of the cost. We might also be able to afford a Navy and an Army again, not to mention boats to patrol our coasts, which we haven’t got at the moment.

Broken Windows Theory

Remember that window in Angela Eagle’s Labour party office in Wallasey, that was supposed to have been broken? Remember the insinuation that this had been done by wicked Corbynites? Well, I asked Merseyside Police, and they told me that the window wasn’t that of Mrs Eagle’s office, which wasn’t broken. It was the window of a stairwell and hallway, in an office building which Wallasey Labour Party shares with several others. Bear this in mind when reading coverage of this contest.

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14 July 2016 2:54 PM

As we strive to absorb the true meaning of Mrs May’s reshuffle, please bear in mind that the Foreign Office is nothing like as big a department as it once was, having been dwarfed many years ago by Downing Street’s increasing power over foreign policy. The building is grand, the Foreign Secretary’s personal office enormous, but how many key Cabinet committees will he sit on? Also consider that the new ‘Minister for Brexit’ is the one who will have to depart if the negotiations go wrong. (Picture the scene, two years hence, ‘ I am so sorry, David, but it was after all you who were committed to this goal, and you had my full backing - but as it is…..’)

Optimism and gullibility are poor tools in politics. The real power in the May regime lies among her clever and astute special advisers, especially Fiona Hill (formerly Cunningham, famously involved in a row with Michael Gove which ended in tears and for which Mr Gove –who forced the resignation of Ms Cunningham in 2014 is presumably now paying the price). There is also Nick Timothy, who probably crafted her campaign launch and doorstep speeches, and Stephen Parkinson. All of these will now have to learn to live with the Downing Street civil servants, who may be a good deal tougher to deal with than the Home Office officials they have up till now been working with.

Even so, these people are brilliant professional politicians, and , having turned Mrs May into a Prime Minister, they can presumably ensure that much of the media continue to treat her as if she really is an effective one. This will last until hostile objective facts eventually beat their way past the famous gates of Downing Street, especially the dire state of the economy.

But the general spirit of Mrs May’s government is demonstrated by her appointment to prominent and important active ministries of bland figures such as Amber Rudd, Jeremy Hunt, Liz Truss and Justine Greening, people who (like Chancellor Philip Hammond) have no recognisable politics and could easily be mistaken for Liberal Democrats or New Labourites. So, of course, could Mrs May. How funny it is that she is now being described approvingly in conservative media as a ‘grammar school girl’ a fact she did her best to keep obscure, by leaving it out of her entries in Who’s Who and Dod’s Parliamentary Companion. Imagine what would have been said of Andrea Leadsom had she done this ( keeping unimportant facts out of her CV, no doubt). Had I not pursued several newspapers to set the record straight on this (I have done the same for the TUC leader Frances O’Grady) , I suspect the half-truth, that she attended a comprehensive, would be the standard story.

Very soon, she must turn her attention to the frightful state of the economy, handed over to her by Messrs Cameron and Osborne and bafflingly reported as a success by so many in my trade. And she must consider the crazy waste of money which is HS2, and the even crazier waste of money which is Trident submarine replacement, a weapon designed for a war that ended 25 years ago, against a country that no longer exists. Not to mention the strange, grandiose plans to make London’s airports even bigger and noisier If she is as bold as all the sycophants say, she will reject all these. There are much better ways of spending the money.

Oh, and before I go, some of you will recall an edition of Question Time in which I explained David Cameron's enthusiasm for same-sex marriage (if such it was) by the fact that he hated his own party. This was greeted with incredulity by David Dimbleby. But was he right to be incredulous?

The prominent journalist Ian Birrell, who has also worked as a speechwriter for Mr Cameron,wrote the other day in the Guardian :

'Shortly after David Cameron’s election as Conservative leader, we were throwing around ideas to underscore his determination to change the party. None seemed to excite much enthusiasm. “Have you not got anything that will annoy the right a bit more?” he asked. Such was the mood in his early days, driven by his fierce desire to plant the Tory flag firmly on the centre ground and stop “banging on” about Europe.'

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13 July 2016 10:41 AM

I enjoyed this quiz from ‘the Guardian’, in which you are asked to guess correctly whether the quoted statements were made by the alleged Christian voice of Middle England, Theresa May, or the Son of the Man Who Hated Britain, Ed Miliband.

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11 July 2016 5:49 PM

What a funny country this is, and what funny political parties it has. Both appear to be more or less mad, as if designed by Lewis Carroll for a larger-than-original Mad Hatter’s Tea Party.

The governing party has just lost its leader because a majority of voters rejected his principal policy, British membership of the EU. It has loopily replaced him with a successor who *also* favours British membership of the EU.

In doing so, it has perhaps accidentally avoided a vote in which someone else might have been picked.

The Labour Party is embarking on a leadership struggle between its old-fashioned left-wing members and its fashionably Blairite MPs, who barely speak the same language. Bizarrely, the week after Labour’s Iraq War was shown definitively to have been a colossal and inexcusable mistake, the supposed standard-bearer of common sense, rectitude and goodness is a Labour MP. A Ms Eagle, who voted for the Iraq war at the time (when the average Natterjack Toad could have seen it was a daft idea) and repeatedly voted against any investigation of it later.

She is, however, an accomplished producer of clichés, as she showed at her campaign launch. What she stands for, apart from stupid wars, it is very hard to see.

Ms Eagle's main task will apparently be splitting her party down the middle, possibly aided by lots of lawyers, and I can only wish her the best of British luck with that.

Mrs May's main task will be leaving the EU, a policy she disagrees with and campaigned (rather feebly) against, perhaps hoping nobody would notice (they did, Theresa, they did).

Thus, they have picked a leader who actively disagrees with her own government’s main and central task. Almost every significant policy decision from now on is affected by the EU question. How can this possibly be sensible?

One has to ask why Mr Cameron bothered to resign, if this is the best they can do.

And thus Mrs Theresa May, who appears to have been elevated to her new eminence largely by ‘The Times’ newspaper, will shortly go to Buckingham Palace to see the Queen, before she formally assumes her duties.

It appears that the interview with Mrs Andrea Leadsom, which appeared in ‘The Times’ on Saturday ....(I have been struggling since to find any quotation from Mrs Leadsom which justifies the headline : ‘Being a mother gives me edge on May — Leadsom’ . I mean, I cannot find any words from her which contain this sentiment, which seems to me to be a problem given that it is so stated in the splash headline).... seems to have frightened Mrs Leadsom into giving up her campaign for the Tory leadership.

I am not especially keen on Mrs Leadsom, who doesn’t appear to be a social or moral conservative, and whose collapse on Monday suggests she lacks the stomach for a fight. But she might have done better than I or anyone expected. At the weekend I began to pick up signals that the Tory membership might be going to do to the Parliamentary Tory Party what the Labour membership have done to the Parliamentary Labour Party – choose a leader who was more loyal to the party’s aims than they were.

They may actually have been planning to vote for Mrs Leadsom. They would have done this on the very sound grounds that she supported the main task of the new post-Cameron government – taking Britain out of the EU. They may well have thought it ridiculous that, having ejected a pro-EU prime Minister, they then chose a pro-EU successor, who opposes her own government’s main aim.

Well, now they can’t. Mrs May, who I believe will be a grave disappointment in office to those who have become her cheerleaders, has thus escaped the possible danger of a grave humiliation. But she has also lost the chance of a proper unquestionable mandate from the Tory members, who are now free to mutter against her that they were never asked. Which they will, soon.